Students who choose the High-Immersion Unity or High-Immersion Unreal concentration will need:

VR-ready PC (Intel i5 or greater, high-end graphics card)

HTC Vive or Oculus Rift

In Collaboration With

Why Take This Nanodegree Program?

In this program, you’ll gain the skills needed to develop world-class Virtual Reality content. You’ll master the core principles of VR development and design, learn to turn your creative ideas into high-performance VR applications, and pursue an advanced concentration as you transform from VR generalist to in-demand specialist.

Virtual reality job openings are up 800%

Learn with the Best

Christian Plagemann

Curriculum Developer

Christian co-founded the VR Team at Google, started the VR Nanodegree program at Udacity, and developed this VR curriculum together with our partners and the team.

Matt Sonic

Vasanth Mohan

Content Developer

Vasanth previously worked at Stanford's Virtual-Human Interaction Lab. In addition to Udacity, he is working on an initiative called FusedVR, to help raise VR awareness and inspire more people to get started creating content.

Suzanne Leibrick

Content Developer

Suzanne is an independent VR designer. She is also a cofounder of ARVR Academy, a non-profit that teaches women VR and AR development at low cost, and aims to create gender parity in the VR and AR industry in 5 years.

Austin McCasland

Content Developer

Austin is a virtual reality user experience designer. His background is in interactive sculptural new media, and he has a Masters degree in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University.

Sky Nite

Content Developer

Sky, also Head of Education at Upload VR, uses a combination of entrepreneurship, design, authorship, and engineering to create beneficial systems and media which will build cooperation towards an ever-improving future.

Chris Birke

Content Developer

Chris Birke is an experienced game developer devoted to GPU programming, procedural generation, and emergent technologies for VR, who hopes to bring new life and expression to future digital worlds.

Joe Radak

Content Developer

Joe is an independent game developer from New Jersey. He graduated with a degree in Astrophysics from Penn State University and is currently spending his time exploring VR game development with Unreal Engine 4.

Course Path

Self-select your starting point as either Term 1 or Term 2, depending on your current skills and experience. If you're new to VR, select Term 1. If you have a working knowledge of Unity as a game developer or digital storyteller, select Term 2. All students will ultimately move to Term 3.

Term 1

Foundations

Learn the Unity game engine, C#, and Google Cardboard to master the foundations of VR development.

What You Will Learn

VR Developer Syllabus

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Term 1

Foundations

Focus on the fundamentals of using the Unity Game Engine to build beautiful and performant VR scenes, and learn how to make your VR experience more dynamic and responsive by using C# programming in the Unity interface.

Leverage the Unity game engine, C#, and Google Cardboard to learn the foundations of VR development.

Need to Prepare?

Term 2

Essentials

You’ll learn the fundamentals of VR design including ergonomics, user testing, and interface design, as you establish a solid foundation to approach any VR design task. You’ll hear exclusive perspective from industry professionals about the future of VR, and start preparing for your concentration.

VR Platforms and Applications

Need to Prepare?

You'll need to understand Unity scene creation, basic 3D math, how to create and deploy VR applications using Cardboard, and how to write C# scripts for Unity.

Term 3

Specializations

Here is where you’re transformed from VR generalist to in-demand specialist! You’ll select one of two concentrations—Mobile Performance & 360 Media, High-Immersion Unity, or High-Immersion Unreal—and work through specialized projects on the way to your final Capstone Project!

Need to Prepare?

Make sure you've done your research, and are ready to choose your Concentration!

“The partnership with Udacity is central to our efforts to disseminate critical information on Samsung technologies to the developer community. Within this framework, the Udacity VR Nanodegree program is an excellent vehicle to engage developers and strengthen the Gear VR ecosystem.”

Essentials

Term 2

Prerequisites

All students will ultimately advance to Term 3. Completion of Term 3 is required to graduate. You'll enroll in Term 3 upon completing Term 2. The cost for Term 3 is $400.

FAQ

Why should I enroll in the VR Developer Nanodegree program?

Virtual reality (VR) job openings are up 800% year-over-year. Demand for skilled VR developers and designers who can create high-quality content is growing at an unprecedented rate. The goal of this program is to equip you with the skills and experience you’ll need to take advantage of all this incredible opportunity. If you’re ready to start creating memorable and compelling experiences using the very latest virtual reality technologies, then this is the program for you!

Become a VR Developer

Project

Udacity Carnival

You’ll start with three carnival games that are out of order. It’s your job to fix them using Unity to correctly wire up the event system. You’ll then customize each game with your own images and text. When you finish, you’ll play the three games and send us your score. You’ll win points, have fun, and learn a lot about event-based programming and art customization inside of Unity.

Project

Build an Apartment

Start off by creating some walls. Load meshes into your scene, place them in 3D space, and give them materials and textures to look realistic. Next, add couches, chairs, tables, and rugs, even a kitchen! Once you’ve finished decorating, be sure to add nice mood lighting. You’ll set up high-performance lighting using Unity’s advanced lightmapping tools. Create the apartment of your dreams, in VR!

Project

A Maze

You’ll build 3D UI, waypoint-based navigation, clickable objects, and utilize spatial audio. Players will navigate the maze then find a key that opens a gate to secret treasure. You’ll use all kinds of VR programming techniques like gaze-based interaction, raycasting, control structures, and more.

Project

Puzzler

Apply design techniques like ergonomics, personas, and rapid-prototyping to create a mobile VR application. You’ll need to iterate, document, and create a public write-up for a new game that asks users to solve a familiar Simon-says-like puzzle in a new way.

Project

Night at the Museum

Construct a virtual reality exhibit about a cutting-edge VR company or technology of your choice. This project showcases locomotion, VR scene design, interactivity, and an understanding of the industry. It's also a lot of fun!

Project

The Protagonist Journey

In this project, you'll do everything you need to prepare for a 360 shoot. You'll write the script, produce the storyboard, and then finally plan the logistics surrounding the shoot. By the end, you'll be prepared to make a great 360 film.

Project

The Storyteller’s Revenge

In this project, you’ll stitch together your own footage (or footage provided). Then, you’ll correct the color and edit the raw footage into a story. Finally, you’ll build a custom 360 video player in Unity and add controls, particles, titles, credits, and at least one interaction (like a button and trigger pull, or a gaze-based interaction). The interaction should trigger a different video, branch the story, or allow for replayability.

Project

Rube Goldberg Challenge

This project is a chance for you to create a fully-functional high-immersion VR game. You’ll create a Rube Goldberg game that challenges players to create contraptions that solve physics puzzles. First you’ll import SteamVR and set up your scene environment. Then you’ll add locomotion, grabbing physics, and a menu system. With the core components built, you’ll create Oculus Rift versions of your code.

Project

Performance Bounceback

Performance optimization is one of the most important skillsets for a VR developer, since apps running below the target framerate are essentially unplayable, causing nausea and discomfort. This project simulates a real-world scenario where a VR game has been hastily built with a focus on functionality rather than performance—you have to make it a performant app ready for release.

Project

Capstone

Work to complete a series of VR challenges, winning points as you progress. Create a VR project of your choosing, using any hardware. Choose from a wide range of achievements like “app store submission,” “use of speech recognition,” or “mixed reality trailer.” Each achievement wins a different number of points. To succeed, you need to reach the required points level.

Project

Hide and Seek

This is your first chance to build an Unreal VR experience based around locomotion. You’ll create a find-the-object style of game, create a set of blueprints that randomly hides an object, and develop a locomotion method that allows you to move around the apartment so you can find the object.

Project

Kitchen Cleanup

This project is your first chance to make a game within Unreal Engine 4 for either standing or roomscale VR. You’ll need to utilize motion controllers to build a kitchen-themed interaction game, and you’ll use functions, physics, blueprint communication, and audio to create an immersive experience. Spawn messy dishes and get them into the sink as quickly as possible!

Project

Tic-Tac-Toe

The game is Tic-Tac-Toe against a friendly AI Robot. While fun and attractive, the only problem is that the experience is completely unoptimized for mobile VR. Your task is to use tools like the Profiler, Frame Debugger, and your raw intuition to optimize this project to run at 60 frames per second on your phone.